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Shutting down Kazaa
An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting wired.com article on the fight between the world's media corporations and Kazaa. The lengths Kazaa has gone to to keep itself immune from attack (incorporated variously in Vanuatu (where?), Estonia and Australia), seem to have largely paid off - until now."
If you're not getting the downloads or results to searchers you used to, it might be because you're "leeching". This little utility (scanned with latest version of AVP, F-Prot, and Orion) maxes out your participation level, allowing you to leech to your heart's content.
http://kazaahack.250x.com
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
I have some pr0n movies dl'ing over kazaa. They're going at around 0.5-2k/sec and been going for around a month. If they close it down then damn I'll be pissed.
Kazaa is P2P for the non-power users...I urge everyone to try out eMule / eDonkey....file integrity is next to none other and speed is remarkably impressive (considering the chunk based downloading system). Check it out!
Havn't we shown that attempts to shut down systems like this are doomed to failure, as the system will keep operating without the company or new, better services will take the place of the old service?
This is a measure/countermeasure race, one that the RIAA/MPAA cannot win. Technology changes faster than litigation can be processed, so for every Kazaa that is shut down, the people who are going to develop the next generation of file-sharing utilities will learn from the mistakes made, both legal and technological, and create better tools. There's only so much that litigation can do to prop up a failing business model.
I've moved on... Kazaa is old hat, the media and big coporations are after it. DC++ is growing and if you can find decent hubs they are much better than Kazaa. I happen to be on one hub which requires 100gig verified share and 10mbit of bandwidth...
*grin*
It's hard to condemn someone and still profit from their popularity.
Could someone explain a little bit more on this?
I stopped trying to leech long ago. It's just not very fun with a 56k.
You do realize that if all everyone did was leech then the entire system would collapse right??
I like the way that Overnet does things. Your max download speed is 4X your upload speed. This forces people to use their upstream bandwidth, even if they're not sharing anything (which is evil in itself) as the temp files are all also shared (so anything you're downloading can be downloaded by other people until it's completed).
How dare you! I plan to RETIRE to Vanuatu! With a land area slightly larger than Conneticut, a total population less than 200,000 people, and an economy based mostly on subsistence farming and, er, shady overseas financial deals (with a little tourism on the side,) what's not to love?
o s/ nh.html
Please note the above comments about shady financial dealings, and ask yourself again why Kazaa is incorporated there.
For more information on vanuatu, see the CIA world Factbook.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ge
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
From the article:
Record labels and movie studios want the services closed and fined $150,000 for each illegally traded song or movie.
The dollar figure itself is ridiculous, but I find it interesting that the proposed fine is the same for movies and songs. Let's say the average song is 3 minutes, and the average movie is 90 minutes - i.e. 30 times the length of a song. If the movie fine were $150,000, then the fine for a song should be $5,000 (using duration as the primary factor). If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
Having said that, I don't believe the labels, et al will collect anything.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Not that i like pirating at all. In fact its one of the biggest habit holding people back from adopting open source. If poeple had to pay the fantasy prices they would be alot swifter to use open source instead of pirating. Likewise pirating is bad for independant artists and cheap labels that nobody cares about. People dont pay so they dont care about lower proces.
Still, trying to stop pirating is totally fruitless. Next in line is shadow networks where no one is tracable. To stop one of those is next to impossible. A filter at each ISP can do the trick but it would be an enourmous task to get that implemented in every country. When its filtered just send your packets in some other protocol like vpn or ssh etc. even if they succeed stopping pirating alltogheter over the internet people still will exchange cds and dvds like back in the 90s but with new types of media.
The cost of stopping pirating is just to big and they should spend that money on relations and better products instead of fitghting the windmills.
HTTP/1.1 400
KaZaA, as we know, is laden with spyware. use kazaalite.
So you're basically advocating one company stealing a competing company's property right? So like if I'm your neighbour and I like your car better than mine, I can just go over and steal it because it was making me feel bad about myself?
I got curious, so I checked it out. It's a small island nation in the South Pacific. Here's a map, for the interested:
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
These ventures require money. Who will want to risk money on a venture that has a high likelyhood of getting smashed?
Whack-a-mole Napster, Whack-a-mole Kazaa.
Who's next?
The other Ace in the hole that the RIAA has is going after users. Wait till they sue 500 or so of the most pernicious "sharers" at your local university. Would you step in to replace them?
even if they're not sharing anything (which is evil in itself)
If not sharing is considered evil, and a fellow new to movie trading has nothing to share, then for a fellow without a DVD-ROM drive or the video mastering expertise to make a good DivX rip, how is it possible to download one's first movie from Overnet without appearing "evil"?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Do there also exist DC++ hubs with a decent selection that allow dial-up users? And how is somebody supposed to afford over a thousand CDs to rip to get over the 100 GB minimum? (An mp3 or ogg album at 192 kbps is only about 90 MB.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's not that the people are trying to keep Kazaa alive, Kazaa has no central point to take out, so even if the parent corp went under, Kazaa would still function. All Sharman is trying to do is to stay in business so they can make money.
It seems that Australia is the only weak link Kazaa has when it comes to legal prosecution. If whatshername moves offshore, boom - there's no one to prosecute. The File-sharing part of the internet will be kind of like the Cayman Islands =^_^=.
Here's an interesting idea: Kazaa/Klite has many, many problems (the programming itself). Fix the problems(mirroring issues, corrupted downloads, etc), work full DVD (or encrypted divx) music videos in to the mix, then setup some sort of reasonable pay-for-play scheme, and hell, I'd buy music from the service...Maybe set up some sort of MTV-like html viewer integrated into the service program, and voila: you have a viable filesharing scheme.
Sigh, now if only the content industry would realize that the Internet can be their friend...lol...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Well of course they're in Estonia - Kazaa was written in Estonia by Blue Moon Interactive.
Is it me or is /. just becoming a Wired mirror ? Over the past week it seems I've seen a half dozen stories which were covered in the Wired I received three weeks ago. Hate to say it... but I find Fark has become much more relevant (and entertaining).
I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this? Gnucleus is an open source client for the gnutella network- no ads, no spyware, and no hidden corporations running it. I have been using it successfully for a long time, but whenever i ask others what they use it's always "kazaa". I don't get it.
If the fine for a song were $150,000, well...
It is. Instead of taking actual damages, a prevailing copyright owner can elect to take statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, as defined in Title 17, United States Code, section 504. And for a sound recording, statutory damages can potentially reach $300,000 because copyrights on two separate works are infringed: the copyright on the melody (owned by the songwriter or by the songwriter's publisher) and the copyright on the sound recording (owned by the band or by the record label).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Do you dare to guess what percent of the files you "trade" on these networks, that is, you either download or let others download, is _legal_? As in: the original copyright holder has given permission for the file in question to be redistributed (at least in its original form). Is that 10%, 1%, 0.1%? And please do not sprout that crap about "I own the CD/DVD/program/book". The fact that you are letting 100s of other people download it makes it as ilegal. And please do skip the crap about "I'm just sampling what's out there, I delete the files after I figure I don't like them or buy the original if I do".
/. is running the story in the first place. Kazaa facilitates ilegal sharing of copyrighted materials. It should have been shut down long ago. I don't care if you like or don't like the law. It is the law we've got and you can start by sticking to it. If you don't like it, change it. Let people in countries where there's no such laws live a happy life.
Do you dare give a real figure?
I really don't see why
If enough people do this the RIAA, MPAA, (insert two letters here)AA and whatever might get enough money for them to realise that filesharing isn't as bad as they think it is... And then they just might fuck off to where they belong!
Just a thought.
-Mark
Um... Even from the article it doesn't look like kazaa will be "going down" any time soon. Sherma nset it up so that it would be pretty much impossible to take apart, wheather or not he was still involved with it. I really don't think the media industry has any idea what they are dealing with. They seem to think that now that they have him it will end. They can do eveything they want to him include kill him and kazaa will live on. They really have nothing but the man who started it. Kudoos to him tho ;)
I don't see how parent could have been moderated a troll, Under the DMCA's takedown provisions, making Global Crossing and Register.com terminate Sharman/LEF's internet service is exactly what a copyright owner is supposed to do.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Creedence Clearwater Revival is the best example of this. They were foolish enough to heed the advice of a label accountant and agreed to shelter their royalties into an offshore corporation under the control of the label - and then stood helpless as they discovered to their horror that the corporation and their money vanished.
And of course the labels continue to refuse to open the accounting books for audits. These practices continue today, through contracts that severely restrict audit policies and reducing the royalty flow to artists to a trickle leaving them with no resources to hire the qualified legal counsel necessary to force the labels to open their books. If you thought Enron or WorldCom were bad...
I find it highly ironic and appropriate that the RIAA is chasing a target who is beating them by using their own tactics through offshore puppet corporations with ghost staff and through countries that do not acknowledge US law. In the end when the RIAA is pointing a finger at KaZaa in court, it should be emphasized that they have three fingers pointing back to them.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I feel ashamed of my self just for reading your posts.
It's mostly Linux users apparently
Last time I checked, it didn't even build on Windows. This has changed. I don't think many Windows users are willing to 1. download all of giFT's dependencies, which include SSH, CVS, Cygwin, Cygwin Xfree86, Perl, the Ogg libraries, and more; 2. learn how to use Cygwin; 3. configure the dependencies; and 4. compile giFT when they could just go on kazaalite.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you lived in a geographical area without a cable Internet service provider and without a DSL provider, would you be whistling the same tune? It costs $200,000 to change which geographical area you live in.
They are slow to upload to
So increase your number of simultaneous uploads. If you have 128 kbps outbound, you can serve approximately three dial-up users at full speed, or six at half speed.
and generally dont share anything either.
Many dial-up users share, but their queues fill up real fast.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"About time, those lame music theifs have to learn. (and those video theifs as well). The economy went down from the whole computer-boom after the mainstreaming of P2p clients like napster and later kazaa...coincidence? i think not." ..Just spent 25 min. trying to feel bad for the record company's, but no luck I'm afraid !!.
..Now be quite while I watch "The Two Towers" !!
I'll let you know ig there's any changes !.
Till then, try to be strong mmmmkay ??.
Hugs
i like the blurb where they said that kazaa made millions without spending any money on content. the same could be said of ebay or fedex.
i've never used p2p services, but from a high level kazaa is like a directory service. maybe it does some caching, anonymizing and other kinds of negotiation, but on the whole it's major selling point is that it hooks up different classes of users: producers (well, maybe "data holders" would be better) and consumers.
and it's not all that fair to blame a directory for what its users do wrong. i do find kazaa's "corporate hacks" interesting. they've gone to great lengths to level the playing field on a corporate/legal level. i don't like their tech or their ethics in other areas but they have proved that there are ways for an underdog to fight large corporations.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Why don't they use an opensource protocol such as OpenFT?
They could only supply a windows gui and throw the ads and spyware on the users. They wouldn't be the driving force behind the protocol so the Music-Industry couldn't sue them for providing a filesharing platform. Am i wrong on this?
cu,
Lispy
Even if they lose every single lawsuit, they can't be shut down. The US or Australia have no way of enforcing anything in Vanatu or Estonia. Besides, Kazaalite can continue to operate even if Sharman were nuked off the face of the earth. Hell, BearShare and other gnutella clients are even more decentralised than Kazaa. What they're doing is like trying to kill a fungus by killing the cell that started it. Going after the companies that make the software is useless, because people will continue to use and distribute the software long after the parent company is gone. Eventually, they'll realize that the ONLY way to stop piracy is to go after individuals and use scare tactics, so the RIAA/MPAA will go on a reign of terror arresting college students who share too many MP3s, movies, etc.
Repeal the DMCA!
I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this?
On my dial-up connection, I was never able to start even one download with Gnucleus.
I have been using it successfully for a long time
Are you on dial-up or high-speed?
Will I retire or break 10K?
17.74S 168.31E
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The interesting part of all of this seems to be an underlying belief that every human endeavor must be industrialized. I personally don't pay for shrink-wrapped music, and I never will. I gladly pay musicians by means of a tip charge, cover charge to get into a club, and by buying an occasional CD from the band if they are good. Record companies get nothing from me.
Music isn't an industry, any more than art is. At the moment industry backed music chokes out the independents, leaving you with either corporate music, or having to search for independent music. I would listen to independents more, but I shouldn't have to work that hard to find music. Record labels gained power by getting access to OUR public airwaves and then monopolizing them, and attempts are being made to do the same with the Internet.
I was a musician and lived in Hollywood for a few years. The current system turns music into prostitution, where the only way a band can ever be heard is to prostitute themselves to the labels. The Internet has to potential to return music to its traditional place as folk art, and that is what the labels are out to stop.
Once people realize that music has been with us since the dawn of man, and doesn't need a corporate headquarters to exist and be good, then record companies will finally (and are) lose their grip.
You're doing as good a job bringing down P2P as RIAA/MPAA, you arrogant shit.
By keeping your shared content in stupid circle-jerk setups like that, and keeping Joe Average out, you're effectively ceding the rank-and-file P2P networks to leeches and the RIAA. Which means the RIAA wins.
I know it's all cool to post on Slashdot about how fucking 1337 you are with your 10Mb connection and massive 50-machine home network, and it's just really fucking OUTSTANDING to be arrogant and condescending about how much smarter you are than Windoze Lozers because you run LUNIX.
I know it feels good to be in a stratified plane of existance because you have such 1337 harware, so you only share your massive collections with other arrogant shitheads like yourself. It's a penis-size contest, but without the refreshing honesty of just dropping your drawers and whipping out the actual units.
Meanwhile, P2P networks like Kazaa are seeded with absolute shit by anti-Peer companies and choked by leeches. As that continues, Joe Average will get so frustrated trying to find decent stuff that he'll give up "on that whole Napster thing".
Bang. RIAA wins.
Instead of being the technological equivalent of a fat, rich white businessman in an exclusive golf resort bragging to each other about how fucking rich you are, you should actually stick your neck out and help keep decent content on the P2P networks.
But you're a Slashdot whore, and lord knows Slashdot whores just love being fucking arrogant, condescending pricks.
Fuck you.
Seriously... I have no respect left of KaZaA or the Music Industry.
KaZaA would do anything to make money. The founders will move to strange countries with strange names. The will look into selling "my" hard-drive space and to physically take control of my computer and display ads that they feel are appropriate. I won't use KaZaA.
The Music Industry would have me buy a cd that may or may not work everywhere that I would want to play it. Simply because they are so insecure about their product and the willingness of people to steal it. I have bought 3 cds in the past year and that was plenty for me to decide that I will never buy a cd again. Empower the user with your product... Don't reduce them down to nothing.
that strange country could be nuked tomorrow and I wouldn't mourn the loss of KaZaA. Good friends, newsgroups, and IRC are 10x better than KaZaA... and I don't even have to look at Ads.
gnutella has plenty of current, mainstream content, but it doesn't have the installed base to make it useful to more than garden variety freeloaders. look for something recorded more than 20 years ago, a bit off the top 100 and out of print, and a gnutella search will turn up empty or only point at offline servents. try the same on the fasttrack net and chances are pretty damn good you will find what you want.
funny thing is, if labels like rhino would make the entirety of their extensive old catalogs available in an on-demand kind of format (uncompressed thanks, and happy enough to wait for a pyisical cd-r to be delivered if need be) i wouldn't bother with the p2p game. i don't even mind if they choose to skip the remastering, getting it in a form approximating the original releases would be a-ok.
Use Limewire...no registration, at least i didn't...
Until now implies that something can be done if the judge rules in favor of Hollywood. This is simply untrue. As you can gather from the article, the CEO of Sharman Networks has not set foot in the U.S. and will not do so. Sure the company is on trial, but all that exists of them in the United States is lawyers. How they expect to get traditionally uncooperative countries to shut down servers I don't know. It will be interesting.
Qutoed from the article:
> Estonia, a notorious safe harbor for intellectual property pirates.
That's a bunch of nonsense. The BSA (business software alliance) has a gestapo mentality in this land. They come with the police, they ride your place and they confiscate everything. And they put you into newspaper. There's even a special anonymous phone - call them, tell who to search - and that gives them enough power to go in with a police warrant.
They spread leaflets - "are you a thief, we're soong coming to check you". They have TV ads, fear spam-campaings, etc.
The primary problem with kazaa is that the US courts don't really have jurisdiction here. There isn't much they can do. They tried to get documents using our courts but their request was inconsistent according to the local judges.
when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
I have to agree with Zemran here. I think that the main reason why CD sales have decreased is that THEY ARE TOO EXPENSIVE. With the somewhat recent competition coming from DVDs and Video Games, the music industry MUST show that their products are worth the exorbitant sticker prices charged. It costs less than a dollar for a person to make a CD that ordinarily costs 14 to 19 dollars at a store. Prices are GROSSLY inflated. The RIAA can continue to attack these filesharing services, but they MUST find a way to either lower the price of CDs, add enough value to CDs to merit their price, or do both. If they don't, I expect the record industry to be supplanted by a more consumer-friendly method of distribution. ADAPT OR PERISH.
Sure, feel free to come along and take mine. I do not mind at all, as long as you leave a copy of the car for my own use.
And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between theft and a copyright violation.
"Hollywood lawyers figured the best way to bring Kazaa to justice was to squeeze Sharman."
Am I the only one thinking, please don't squeeze the Sharman...
It is interesting to note how one business depends on another. One would think that companies like Websense (ZDNet has a news article about them- search for ZDNET Websense on Google ) that depend on the P2P filesharing 'industry' will go out of business if Kazaa, etc. are shut down. Though as someone said earlier: for every Kazaa there is shutdown, several more will crop up. If that is the case, it might be a good idea to invest in Websense and their likes ...
At $150,000 per song or movie traded, and say 10,000 traded per day (I figure a low estiment) thats 1.5 billion per day. Say they sue for three years, thats 1.5 trillion in damages. I realize these are numbers just tossed out with no justification, but can anyone think of a lawsuit for a larger sum of money?
You do realize that if all everyone did was leech then the entire system would collapse right??
Exactly the same argument used by the music and entertainment industries, but they're evil so it's OK to "leech" off them.
Don't worry, I've got Karma to burn. I'd just like to know why the RIAA isn't doing this since it seems like such an obvious strategy?
Is there a way that can we can just get rid off the MPAA instead.
The JZA
How do you pronounce KaZaa!? Is it kay'-zaw, kah'-zah, ku-zah', kaw-zaw, or something else?
didnt you mention open source limewire on gNet
It is open standard software running on an open protocol, free for the public to use.
advandages over other p2p
>>>>Remote queueing: if an uploader is too busy to handle a download request, it will queue you. The uploader then serves downloads in a first-come, first-serve basis. This feature is compatible with the queueing schemes used by other vendors.
>>>Safer resumes: LimeWire keeps track of the hashes for all incomplete files. This reduces the chance of a corruption when resuming.
>>>Browse host feature--even works through firewalls
>>>Unique "ultrapeer" technology reduces bandwidth requirements for most users
>>>Limewire is written in Java, and will run on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Sun, and other computing platforms
check out the flash preview here
quote:port 17 udp
Seems like if you want to go after Charmin Networks, you can get to them through Mr Whipple, their well-known spokesperson in their pre-internet days when they were simply in the toilet paper business.
Ok, bad joke on which I tried to hard to establish the link between "Sharman" and "Charmin". Withdrawn.
What is FreeNet?
Supposedly, being on the FreeNet provides total anonymity because the protocols are encrypted from the ground up. You can't know where stuff is coming from and where stuff is going. This prevents spying, even by rogue clients. The content on FreeNet is hosted by every computer that is connected to the FreeNet at the time. You have a data store on your computer when you are connected to the FreeNet, but it is encrypted so you can't know what content from the FreeNet is being hosted on your computer (which brings up other issues). Of course nobody else can supposedly tell either.Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
* Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
* Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
* Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
I don't know the implications, or even if it is a feasible task to port P2P to FreeNet, but I think something like this is a necessary step as time marches on and as the red tape and legal woes thicken. (Maybe the implicit anonymous nature of the FreeNet doesn't allow for the same P2P processes to work -- then again maybe it's ideal) .Right now FreeNet is very slow and the last time I used it (version 0.4) was buggy. However I haven't tried the latest 0.5 release.
Of course this won't necessarily prevent the companies that create and distrubute the P2P software from being prosectued. However it might provide the anonymity that these companies need to distribute their software and keep operating -- provided they don't make themselves known to the public. If they are not known, then nobody can find them. Which begs the question: Then how would these companies get advertising revenue if nobody knows about them? Well, they could advertise on a webpage on the FreeNet and accept credit card payments over the FreeNet, and then the advertiser's content would magically appear in the P2P application. This would take a lot of trust on behalf of the advertisers.
Just a thought. I'd like to hear a response from developers who are involved with the FreeNet project and/or P2P clients about the feasibility of all this.
eMule is evil because it is seriously affecting eDonkey and Overnet performance. eDonkey is only good for private trading groups, IMO. Overnet is the ways to go, or Direct Connect rocks too if you have a shitload to share.
The comment I made about leechers obviously wasn't for people just starting out. By leecher I meant someone who uses the system and simply doesn't share any files and moves everything out thier download directory as soon as it completes. Obviously you wouldn't expect anyone with nothing to share to contribute much, however as they download stuff and build up an archive of files, they would be expected to have at least some of it as shared in order to 'contribute back to the community' from which they got their files.
The problem with freenet, at least what I've seen in the past, is that it just doesn't do the p2p side of things very well, as things are not as direct as it is with other networks. The average p2p user is rather going to want content coming into their hd immediately.
I had an interesting thought the other day. Hang with me for a moment...
If I hear a song on the radio, and I record it. That is okay. If I record something off the TV antenna, that is also ok.
Now consider companies like Clear Channel, whose only goal is to cover every square inch of the US's surface area with the same radio stations. Theoretically, 88.9 in Podunk, USA, is the same as 88.9 in San Francisco, Tacoma, Buffalo, etc. Now, I'm wandering around, going to work, etc. being bombarded with these radio stations, and these television broadcasts, so, if I were recording everything broadcast to me, I'd probably have copies of all the latest music and some popular television programs. Now suppose, through corporate machinery, prettymuch the same opportunity were available to each and every American Citizen. What copyright gripe could the media companies have?
I realize the nature of copyright is such that I cannot redistribute works that are copyrighted. I can't find it on findlaw, but it seems like someone was caught selling stuff that had been broadcast (the superbowl, I think) that he had recorded. If memory serves, the ruling was something like new audiences were being created for the copyrighted work, audiences the original copyright holder was entitled to. But what if at every corner of the US you can pick up Clear Channel?
Better yet--what if I start a TiVo type service. We make you sign lots of paper work and we verify where you live. We have a computer program and a schedule of all content on broadcasts you can receive. Our computer records it, and lets you download it from our website. I'd expect the FBI to haul me away and lock up the key--but I don't think it is (or should be) illegal. What exactly has happened here? The people we're serving have a right to the content, we've just automated the time-shift of when that content is delivered to them. We'll even include the commercials, though for single songs people might want, this won't work as a lot of radio stations have moved their commercials to about once per hour or once per half-hour.
As far as quality goes, I wonder if Sattelite radio is obscured behind some sort of "terms of service" agreement that you agree to listen in exchange for not recording at all.
Within days we've seen two articles from Wired pumped here (this one and http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/24/144621 7&mode=thread&tid=98 this one on Sony, RIAA et al)
C'mon Taco - how about some original work rather than just pointers to magazines (that actually hit the streets about two weeks ago -- why the lag?)
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
"This reduces the value of the music, and in turn reduces the value of the artist's contribution to society."
I'm reminded of a story I read of an artist whose friend was expressing an interest in art. He bought her a Piccaso sketch. She thought it wasn't an especially pretty reproduction, but it was a gift (and her "values" put an obligation on her), so she found a place to hang it were only family members were likely to notice. A few weeks later a professor visiting her for dinner happened to catch sight of it. "Why are you displaying an original Picasso there!" Realizing it was "valuable", she redisplayed it proudly. She made everyone look at it who came over.
Now the question. What is the inherent artist "value" of the artist's contribution? Can it be related in a meaningful way to the *market value*? To such that the reducing the market value of music reduces the value of the artist's contribution to society implies the artists contribution is merely to increase the GNP. Might as well sell pretzels, then. Wrong. "As a musician" seems to me to be "as an MBA" in artists clothing.
Roughly 100% of those I know with broadband pirate stuff.
:p)? That'll be a $130.000+interest, thank you.
Roughly 0% of those I know with dial-up download stuff, they ask those above for a burned CD, but often they don't like asking for hand-outs.
Why? Speed. It's not about whether Napster / KaZaA / WinMX or whatever is easy to use or anything. As more and more people get/want broadband the faster it goes. What RIAA is doing is like playing Whack-A-Mole on a game machine that keeps going faster and faster.
Pretty soon, you can have so much stuff that if you're caught, you're bankrupt. 200gb of mp3s to $2/song (about full retail price here
I'm pretty sure you can manage to do so already with books. Oh that's 200gb of e-books, only 1 kazillion dollars for you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't care about being a power user or not. I want to be on as diverse a P2P network as possible, to have the best chance of find relatively obscure work. Being able to use a back-propagating learning neural network that reassembles fragmented downloads intelligently and learns bad host IDs is useless to me if I am on a P2P network limited to Rush fans.
Kaza Lite now gives you a permanent participation level of 1000 (Supreme Being).
SSH, CVS, Cygwin, XFree86, perl are not giFT dependencies.
Downloading giFT currently requires CVS and SSH. Compiling UNIX code on Windows requires Cygwin, and running it requires an X server. (Or has it been ported to pure Win32 to compile with the MinGW compiler?) The install document lists Zlib, Perl, libDB, libID3, libvorbis, and ImageMagick as strongly recommended dependencies.
but you have to realize that giFT hasn't officially been released
In other words, praising giFT on Slashdot is spreading vapour.
Will I retire or break 10K?
for the graphical user interface, giFTcurs ..that runs in a console window.
I didn't know that giFT came with a terminal-based UI. The image in the upper-right corner of http://gift.sourceforge.net/ sure looked like an X client running in a window manager to me.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Feel free to copy my car. I don't mind.
if only i had some mod points for you to bring you out of flamebait land
you are absolutely right about every point
The whole problem behind these networks (Kazaa, Napster, Audiogalaxy, etc.) is that everyone wants money for what they do.
Freenet is a great idea, decentralized system, anonymous access, etc. Why not capitalize on that concept (in the sense of make value of, not money from)?
I realize everyone wants money, but if you argue we are just sharing information, and someone is making a profit off of it, then there is a problem with the whole system.
C'mon, I know that the readers of slashdot alone, could probably organize such an initiative and have a beta release in at least a few months.
I'm curious about how (if) the US will execute the shutdown when all of the stuff is off-shore and not under US juristiction?
There's no way in hell the US will take military action against a country because people in that country are violating US copyright laws. That would be like sending the DEA into Amsterdam to arrest people who smoke pot (legally) there. Our laws do not apply to other countries, and attempting to enforce our laws in other countries completely denies the sovreignty of other countries. If the US did that, it would in effect be a global tyrant, ruling other nations from afar without giving them any representation in congress. Rather like what Britain did to the colonies. Forcing other countries to pay the Microsoft Tax, etc, would in effect be taxation without representation, because they didn't have any say in the US laws governing microsoft, and they don't have much choice but to use Mindows.
Repeal the DMCA!
Quote:
For the entire article, try this
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
I just moved to Bangkok from the U.S. I must say, I was absolutely stunned at the low prices of VCDs. Not shady pirated copies, mind you: I'm talking real, shrink-wrapped-and-hologram-thingy Hollywood movies.
VCDs are Heaven. I absolutely love that I can sacrifice a little quality for a great price. (Where have I heard that before?)
Get this: Today, I just bought three more movies for $7! All perfectly legit. That beats the hell out of stressing over mencoder and your Netflix queue. And guess what? I can perfectly legally encode to mpeg4 to put on one CD, or on my home file server (I like to play music and movies with a wireless laptop.) Frankly, I'm having so much fun, I can't believe I'm not breaking any laws.
In two months, I've spent more money on legal movies in Bangkok than I did in the U.S. in probaly the last two years (and I make next to nothing at my job right now). Why? Because I don't feel alienated and villified as a consumer.
Most people probably have a couple of pirated games or so they can share.
Twenty pirated NES games at 128 KB each after compression still total only 2.5 MB, nowhere near the 1 GB that most hubs seem to require.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The world media corporations are scared to death of the Internet and how file sharing is quickly decreasing their revenue. At some point they are going to realize that the Internet, as we know it today, is their main enemy (rather than just file sharing applications). Don't you think they will try really hard to lobby for killing the Internet? I know, I know, they can and they do sell content on-line, but the threat is too great, and they may push really hard to create a new network with such draconian control that no piracy will take place. Do you think this is a real threat? Will they succeed? As a first step, they could simply buy a few of the major ISPs (most are bankrupt) and impose content filtering. They certainly have enough money to fight this war...
I once came upon some edonkey links while searching for music videos, and decided to give it a try ( to get the videos ). After loading the authors version of Edonkey and doing some searches plus clicking on edonkey link to queue up file, I wound up with nothing. It may have been a config problem, though I searched through message boards and check out issue/resolution posts. Still nothing. I even resorted to the basic searches like *.mpg, *.mp3, etc and still nothing.
In comparison, Kazaa(using Kazaa lite ) may not always turn up what I am looking for. But it is much better than Zero hits, and I think that is due to its popularity. Suprisingly, Shareza does a good job also, though I have to wait a bit to find peers and supernodes to connect to. On linux I have only used Qtella, which also works fine in regards to returning results to my searchs.
I digressed a bit by mentioning other P2P networks, but I am in a comparison mood right now, so I compared all the ones I used so far.
Question - is there a "kazaa-lite" for (Mandrake)Linux? I would love to try out their network while on my favorite OS.
F0rt0r
Sig Impaired and Proud of It!
I can't afford a sig!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Madonn', you are the peoples poet.
Make it illegal for companies to advertise with Kazaa. This approach of attack uses the fact that the companies who advertise with Kazaa are much easier to nail. When Kazaa's revenue stream dries up, it will be interesting to see how long Kazaa continues to offer their facilities, wherever they may actually be. Neehehehehe!!!
The alt.binaries.sounds.*.mp3 hirarchy, to be exact. It's much easier and I've never had any problems thus far. . .
I call on all thieves to email their ill gotten gains back to the MPAA. I have about 300GB that I should send back to them and if the rest of you criminals did the same we could solve this scourge on society once and fer-all.
The secondary method is to use MinGW
Thanks. I don't consider a Windows program completely "free" if it depends on a $1,000 compiler from Microsoft. And I had to make a wild guess at the requirements to compile giFT because I didn't want to take the time to set up CVS, become familiar with CVS, and download the Windows build documentation, which was listed on the web as available only in CVS, only to find that building the software required a $1,000 compiler from Microsoft. (That's more than I make in a year's worth of allowance.)
but even the most popular frontend for linux, giFTcurs, is console based.
I was confused as to the requirements of the popular frontend because the top right corner of every page shows what looks like an X frontend.
Unfortunately, I can't run Linux or FreeBSD effectively on either of my computers, both of which have winmodems and neither of which I got an opportunity to customize.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I can't say I have any sympathy whatsoever for the RIAA/MPAA/[insert your favorite evil monopolistic content group here]. They have been ripping off decent people who choose to go and actually purchase CDs and videos for years, and they have nobody but themselves to blame when the consumers decide to return the favor. This is not about anything more than big-shot record label execs getting scared that they might lose the opportunity to finance their fat arses, big houses, and fast cars with the hard-earned money of the general public. I'm sorry, but I have better things to do with my money. Maybe if the record companies had decided on a business model that didn't put the bottom line before honesty and fairness, they wouldn't have to worry about Kazaa and other P2P networks today.
Ripping vinyl is a huge pain in the ass. I ripped a few 12" singles once and realized that if anyone walked within about 30 feet of where I was ripping (I was on the 2nd floor of a really old building) the needle might pick up the vibrations of the footsteps and alter the recording. Although I would love to have the time and energy to rip all my vinyl, it's just too much of a pain in the ass. I've actually encountered vinyl rips that have record-skips recorded into them!
-dbc
Record companies get nothing from me.
I bet they do. I bet there's shops you frequent that have piped in music. By shopping there you are supporting those record companies who have their music piped in.
creation science book
The last time I checked, the United States alone had enough firepower to destroy several small islands in the pacific.
The next step is questionable. Do you line the users up and have them shot?
Y'know, the U.S. government, no matter what you may want to believe, is not Stalin's Russia. Invading foreign countries and murdering people over file sharing is just about the quickest way I know to bring about 9-11 every frickin' day of the year, not to mention outright declarations of War. Despite what you may think, the United States in not invincible--it can no more take on the whole world then could Nazi Germany (Godwin's "Law" kiss my hairy ass). Even if it didn't come to war, the U.S. still has to trade with other nations and an embargo can be just as damaging. All this for the RIAA? Uh, no. The national interest is a bit bigger then what Hilary and Co. want.
Isn't the CDC supposed to be coming out with a P2P thingy-ma-bob pretty soon?
KaZaA is the suck anyway, and providing this CDC proggy isn't beridden with viral code I will happily make the switch.
I realize that it has become popular among some of the people who frequent
BUT
BUT
Ah, you took the five steps ahead approch to this. I do not doubt that your doomsday end-result isn't likely to happen, on the contrary, it will happen--it's just a matter of time.
However, this thing we call piracy is nothing new. Closed circle casual piracy, like casual sex will always be around, however now we see a change that's been brewing since Napster came to power, we're now seeing MASS piracy, MASS amounts of people engaging in IP violations. This says something about the media conglomos themselves, this says something about how the consumer trend is changing, and this says something about IP/copyright laws in general.
The sides are polarizing, and what used to be a decent civilization of consumers and content creators has now de-evolved into a new "Wild West".
Let them come, Let the RIAA/MPAA start suing consumers who utilize p2p in their spare time. I don't think you fully understand what kind of shit storm that would rain down on the entertainment industry once this starts. Why do you think they've been trying to shutdown the sites instead of suing the users?? Not because they love us, but because of massively BAD PR. There are MILLIONS, and MILLIONS of p2p file swappers....Some old, some young, some with good paying jobs, some without.
Some with a grudge against the "man" and some who just want to actually get to know what they are buying before they buy it. And there are others in between.
Once you label all these diverse people as "criminals" or "thieves", or even imply that they are (people in the crossfire for example)they will ALL revolt.
And that's not all, there are people in the crossfire here that have nothing to do with p2p that will get hurt too. CD-R taxation, ISP being taxed and therefore the costs are past on to your grandma out in montana on dialup who googles only for cross stich patterns. And when they look at what's going on, they'll blame the person who's behind the jacking of the connection costs--The ISP, and once the ISP gets enough heat on them, then they bitch back at the RIAA/MPAA...then after the news media gets wind of all of this...MORE people try out p2p, and more people see how obnoxious the tactics of the MPAA/RIAA are, and the cycle continues to escalate.
The "general populace" you speak of *is* engaged in this activity.
Far too many people spend time on their polar sides to understand what is going on here. The RIAA is taking fair use away, the MPAA extending copyrights every time they're about to expire, price fixing of CDs, obnoxious bands on payola radio, overly restrictive DRM on CDs, the list goes on and on, but that's just to name a few.
Something has to give or this will fester at a exponetial rate. People will be hunted down and fined/jailed, the RIAA will be bleeding red ink, their will still be fabucated crap on the radio. There will be rallies in the streets and online, mass dissent among consumers, and most of all, new laws that will bring new restrictions on things that we thought were safe.
Look at it this way, the whole p2p idea sprung up out of practically no where, and jetted into the internet's mainstream practically overnight. Yet, the RIAA has been working the same business model for multiple decades. If you don't move fast enough and change enough, your consumers will either fuck you, or leave you. And p2p users who are and who used to be media consumers are doing them both. That tells me that something is wrong on the content holder's side. But that isn't to say they should heed to the "pirate's" wishes, all i'm saying is both sides have better start looking for compromises before it becomes to late.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
The technology behind FreeNet is very cool, very well thought out, except for one thing: searching. You can't really search for arbitrary strings like most apps. They are working on it, but a good solution is yet to come out of it.
There are some indexing services, but they need to grow and get a user community behind them (like FileNexus and ShareReactor for eDonkey/Overnet)
If they got that going, it'd be interesting... but then you would still be restricted to searching in what was in the releases index... which would not reflect everything that is available.
Cheers
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
As technically illegal as most of the activity on these networks is, it most certainly is not immoral. 99% of the files I download/upload on Kazaa may be copyrighted, but why should I pay for my music/movies?
I have _fair use rights_ to do this, and besides, most of the music the RIAA churn out sucks, so why should I pay for it? Their business model just sucks; don't blame the people who merely share and trade. Information wants to be free.
Discovered many years later to have been a renegade from Kazaa,
the Mule used his network powers, at the time attributed to genetic
programming, to become, for a short time, the effective Emperor of a
Second P2P Empire.
Starting by taking control of a group of bandits, then ever-larger
networked groups until, seven years after he began his campaigns, he
was able to overcome the military might of the RIAA. There he took on
the identity of Rippo Giganticus, the Mule's "clown", and sought
refuge with Rosen and Toran Darell, who had been sent from AudioGalaxy
to try to secure the support of the Mule for the independent traders
in what seemed an inevitable civil war against the Foundation's
plutocratic and authoritarian regime.
From RIAA HQ he was taken to Estonia, where, with the help of the
Visi-Gnutella provided by Ebling Valenti, he was able to ensure the
rapid collapse of Foundation morale and its capitulation to his
forces. Still undetected he joined the Darells and Valenti in their
escape to Sydney, where the collapse in morale and surrender were
repeated.
From Sydney they travelled via Neotrantor to Vanuatu, where, under
his network conditioning, Valenti was able to deduce the location of
the Second Foundation. By then Rosen had herself deduced that "Rippo"
was the Mule, and killed Valenti before he could reveal the
whereabouts of the Second Foundation.
After five years in which further expansion was halted in favour
of consolidation, largely brought about by the Second Foundation's
interference with his key personnel, he sent Han Pritcher and Bail
Channis to continue the search, knowing that Channis was an agent of
the Second Foundation. The Second Foundation trapped him into
over-confidence, and on the isolated world of Rossem their First
Speaker was able to convince him into believing that they didn't
really exist after all.
From then until his death a few years later he ruled as a benign
WXP authorization agent, by which time the Second Foundation had been
able to secure a smooth transition of power back to the Foundation
proper. (11-II; 12-I; 13-17-71)
Remember, the only people that file sharing hurts is the middle man. The movie actors, and crew as well as the musicians are doing great if people are seeing their movie and listening to their songs. Kazaa is an amazing piece of programming that really allows for great use of bandwidth. (although a CNN report would make you think otherwise) The only people who feel they are getting ripped off are the record executives and the Hollywood bigwigs who will spend millions upon millions to shut down the best P2P that has ever been available, just so someone else can start up another.... Napster, ScourX, Morpheus, Kazaa.... you'll never stop freedom.
I mean really, you hardly have anything to complain about here, using a quasi-illegal program to share music you shouldn't, by law, be sharing in the first place. Please feel free to drop the hypocritical facade any time your ready. So while you engage in semi-illegal file transfers, people are leeching files from you in a similar manner. I call that "Irony".
Move along, nothing to see here.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
An awesome article. I recommend you actually (*gasp*) read it.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
My own personal opinion is that if songs were about 5 cents US or less or you could get the whole album for 99 cents or less the piracy problem would go away and the industry would be making more money and not less because there would be no incentive to cheat.
There is a precedent for this scenario. Remember the early 90s when CompuServe charged $6 or $12 per hour for access and had several hundred thousand members. Remember what happened when Netcom introduced $20/month flat rate pricing ?
It's too bad that in reality the clueless newbies normally called content industry CEOs don't get this and maybe never will.
The monthly flat rate models I've seen for music access just don't work for me. Why ? I already have dsl, netflix, cable, cell phone, health club, etc. One more monthly bill just isn't possible.
Lets see people who work get screwed and those who are leaches or independently wealthy always benefit. Honestly our government should have declared all out war on the record companies. Only the artist who produced the music should own it, their should be limits on the amount of time music is owned after 15 years it should go public domain. We should not be seeing the DCMA but instead bills and laws to protect the sources of which our content really comes from and the consumers who buy it. What kind of ass backwards system has the middle man as the all powerful and protected being. But it is not going to happen, not with all the corruption in government today. Just remember this when you go vote for corporate whores like Bush.
I shared more and more and it never seemed to change from 14(low). I dunno why. I gave up eventually.
Here's some info for you.
They Might Be Giants:
First Heard: Bootleg of Apollo 18 on cassette.
Own: Just looking one last very hard to find release.
Last Purchase: One week ago. Dial-a-song anthology.
Bare Naked Ladies:
First Heard: Bootleg of Gordon on cassette.
Own: All their albums but the greatest hits, and no singles.
Last Purchase: Their last album.
Alpha Team:
First Heard: Go Speed Go through my dorm room wall.
Own: A bootleg cassette I had my neighbor make. A collection of morning cartoon songs I got because it listed Speed Racer. An assoted Techo collection called Sm:)e. And a three song single of Go Speed Go remixes. Oh an the mp3 I got to make a cd with, before I found the previously listed cds.
And there are more examples.
All also note that the RIAA doesn't serve their market at all. All they are interested in doing is pushing shit sandwiches to the exclusion of everything else. They are, in the classic Teddy Rossevelt sence, a Trust. They control, to the great disadvantage of the market, everything about a piece of music, including whether the girl scouts can sing it, cradle to grave. What horrifies them isn't that people are stealing, but that they've lost control of their process and their monopoly will die, leaving them having to actually participate in the market as opposed to dictating to it.
How many people use the sharing networks primarily for the hard to find stuff? The RIAA made them go there. They decide what music is rare, hard to find, or just unproduced. I know in my "hate to go shopping for anything especially music" case, it takes a while before I stop activly searching local record stores, and enter either a passive searching mode, or actively search for it on-line.
When it comes to the lesser of two evils. I always pick the smaller, more diffuse evil, as opposed to the giant hulking brimstone smoking version. Call me quirky.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
You always had to share at least one song.
As soon as I read this comment, I downloaded emule and searched for Shania Twain I am gonna getcha just for a test. The avrage speed I got was around 5 KBps.On the other hand, if I ddownload the same song using Kazaalite, I get a speed of 48KBps. So just tell me once again as to why should I use eMule?
What's under yellowstone?
Ah, I remember them well.
if MP3 downloading is stealing, how come i can listen to any music i want on radio stations and internet radio ? It's only stealing because they think they are losing money, not because it's actually stealing.
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Stealing service from an organization making money from other people's copyrights. Oh, the horror!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I wonder how much of a mercenary force the RIAA would have to hire to invade and take over the country. I don't reckon they can be particularly well defended...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If RIAA thinks going after KAZAA is difficult, imagine them going after something like Freenet. The way I figure, if there's a way to send money to something, there's a way to take it back. A system with no financial structure won't be attackable in a cort of law (not that they can't do something like try to DOS the network out of existance)
Anyway, what are some good non-evil P2p services? I've stayed away from kazaa, as I'm not really a big fan of spyware. I've been using WinMX to find realy rare stuff, but most of my downloading, untill thirsday night, was done over the campus lan. Thirsday night they busted into a few dorms and shut down the central searching system (Strangesearch) for our campus. Are their any other good ones out there based on open source stuff?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Maybe it's time to find an ISP that does not put these restrictions on you. Like SpeakEasy for instance.
Unless consumer start rewarding companies that provide services at the consumers terms, and shy away from those ISPs with draconian policies, those caps will only get worst.
Leeching is bad for P2P networks no matter the reason. If everyone acted the same way as the leechers, the value of the P2P would drop considerabley.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Vanuatu (where?), Estonia (where?) and Australia (where?)
Probably because the RIAA is slowly but surely getting a bad reputation since they're cracking down a lot more. They don't need anymore of this.
Imagine the headlines of, "RIAA SHUTS DOWN KEY PARTS OF INTERNET". Yeah, that's a major exaggeration. Does the media exaggerate? Never!
People of the record industry are just a bunch of mindless jerks.
I used to spend lots of time at record shops, trying to find recordings of certain tracks.
When writing to record industries (if still existing), they either do not reply at all, are simply say that those (previous LP's) will never be put on cd.
So if they are not willing to sell (i like to pay for it) what give them the right to forbid me to obtain it otherwise?
Hans
That just because people sneak in, doesn't mean they would've bought tickets in the first place. Look at the Montreal Expos. If you could sneak into a game, I doubt you necessarily would've bought tickets to the game ;) Maybe you only went because it was "free". But hey, what if you go for "free", and you found you really really like the Expos, or whoever they were playing.... I've done that. dl an Mp3 that I loved so much, I actually go out and buy the album. But I never would've bought it, if it wasn't for the MP3...
Is there a client for Linux? Doesn't look like it.
I forget what 8 was for.
Can't we get these entities classified as terrorist groups? There actions speak clearly. If your statements are true.
Err, sorry, I've been on holiday for a week now, and I'm a bit late on my mail checking, so I didn't read all the replies, but the Vanuatu Islands is a group of islands that belong to France. It's in French Polynesia (Tahiti is an island of FP).
It's really amusing that the MPAA is trying to get the 3 FastTrack companies (Grokster, Kazaa, Morpheus) for US$150,000 per illegally traded file.
According to my most recent count, this comes out to US$122,027,707,800,000. Hint to the movie execs (whom I work for): When you're trying to make a point, suing nearly insolvent companies for 122 trillion isn't really the best way to go.
I'm not actually sure that would work out for them. Kazaa is just about as distributed as OpenFT -- distributed enough, anyway, that no central servers are required to keep it running. As long as we can still get the client no one can stop us from running it.
The reason they don't use an OS protocol -- or open up the FastTrack protocol -- is that then anyone could write a client for it. If that was possible, do you really think anyone would use their spyware version? In fact, they have gone to a great deal of effort to make their protocol as closed as possible for that reason.
Kazaa could do what you say, the corporation(s) could disappear entirely, and the network would keep going just fine. I'm sure they'll do that, as soon as they get tired of making millions of dollars a year.
i really dont think they have much of a chance of shutting it down, mainly because when they get it down it will just keep on moveing with slight varations, but it will still basically b the same kazza, so they should just fucking stop trying.
Has anyone cracked the challenge/response system that Kazaa put into place?
Why do you labor under the delusion that there is something called right and wrong?
Laws are meaningless unless their enforcers can overcome any and all resistance to them.
Therefore, if the RIAA doesn't affect me or cannot stop me, they don't exist, and I can pirate all I want regardless of what others think.
Television's main purpose is that of cultural programming. Yes, even the 'Learning Channel.' Stop absorbing crap and you will quickly become much, much stronger.
Actually, IIRC, originally Freenet wasn't encrypted at all. The main point is that it's decentralised; there's no real way of tracking who put what on the network as it all gets copied around. A bit like trying to find who originally ripped an mp3 found on Kazaa. Encryption was put on afterwards, which is probably a darn good idea, because then people can rightly claim they have absolutely no idea what's on their node, which makes putting forward any legal case against an individual near impossible. They (i.e. the RIAA, MPAA, etc) would have to make the technology itself illegal.
WTF? I get so sick of this. I'll admit I'm singling you out, but I keep reading these type of comments over and over.
Just because P2P networks potentially can be used for piracy and copyright violation doesn't mean the programs themselves are "quasi-illegal". That is pure and utter BS. A web server such as Apache could be used for the same purpose. An FTP server could be used to share "illegal" files. Hell, ICQ allows you to transfer files between users... is that "quasi-illegal" also?
Currently, it's true that much of the content on these networks is copyrighted by companies that don't want their works traded in this way. There is a good reason for this. Everything cultural has been balkanized and packaged and locked down by the various industries. In the "old days" this was necessary because music and video had a large distribution cost associated with it. This is no longer true.
As filesharing becomes ubiquitous, the greedy hostility of these industries will (thankfully) loose it's grip and many of these forms of culture will once again become about the art. We will all be enriched because of it, except of course for the greedy industry that is currently up in arms trying to figure out a way to turn back time to the "old days".
In the long run, file sharing is not going away. In fact, it's increasing in speed and nothing is going to stop it, short of law mandating a return to ancient times. But don't be dismayed! Ultimately, artists will benefit, and society will benefit also as a result. The only losers will be the greedy corporations.... and to that I say "good riddance".
Don't compare FreeNet to P2P Networks such as Kazaa, Gnutella etc. FreeNet is not meant to be a P2P File Sharing network. It is meant to be a decentralized secure/private network to share webpages and other censored/banned material. (Like the "Great Wall of China").
Problems with FreeNet is that it's all static. You can't really have a PHP/MySQL website on it or anything like that. FreeNet is literly useless. It's ideals is the only good thing about it.
Another problem with FreeNet is it's searching mechanism. It's nothing like rival P2P Networks (such as Gnutella2 etc.). The only things you'd be able to find on FreeNet are very popular files. It would be difficult to release stuff on FreeNet because of that.
IMHO FreeNet is not the future of file sharing. A stable user-friendly client has yet to transpire and it's developers are currently working on other e-mail/enterprise products and not focusing on FreeNet. gIFT seems to be the same way.
Have you tried Shareaza (w/Gnutella2)? Gnutella2 is currently the most powerful/sophisticated and advanced P2P network yet. The Shareaza client is Free/No Spyware/No Ads. You can also set it up to work on a LAN environment, so you can make your own private Gnutella2 network which would work pretty well (since it has Global search).
Shareaza isn't open source but Gnutella2 is. Or it will be, as the specs have yet to come out (though are expected soon).
I'm not completely sure (i'm a little rusty on freenet), but i spent a little time a year ago reading about various p2p protocols and i am currently developing some software that incorperates Gnutella for Syncing.
The problem is bandwidth, Freenet tunnels the files through the network, rather then set up a direct transfer. The advantages are great (ie no one knows who is sending and who is receiving) but the big disadvantage is the huge bandwidth requirments that each node has to spend to get the file to the end user.
Most other Gnutella clients use a direct HTTP connection to transfer the files. But the big thing with gnutella is extentions. If something proves to be a problem, the major clients can rapidly shift to encryption or whatever else is required. The most deployed extentions becomes a defacto standard and is likely to make it into the next protocol spec.
Bandwidth is the biggest concern of p2p network developers, as it is expensive and in short supply to most users. Unless you are american and get cheep bandwidth.
These points also really apply to Freenet, but IMO, GNUnet is ultimately superior, like for one thing, any user on dial-up or with a not-very-permanent connection and IP is basically a leech on Freenet, whereas GNUnet allows practically anybody to both benefit and contribute (not only in uploading files but also improving effectiveness of the network).
GNUnet has other advantages too, but is still in development- you can use it already, but not on Windows (*yet*), and AFAICT, the protocols aren't set in stone yet so you have to keep your GNUnet programs up-to-date to use it. And if you don't find it good enough for you, just keep coming back every few weeks, as work continues (or you can even help out).
*-I say "claim to be copyrighted", as just because Group X says Person Y is doing something, and has a log somewhere, it doesn't really follow that it is true- I could cheerfully tell the world that Hilary Rosen goes through my dustbin, and that I drew a picture of the alleged event. Wouldn't be true, but it'd be my word against hers (OK, that would be rather unlikely, and I'm in another country. Blah blah). Further, just because Person Y appears to be sharing a copy of There's Something About Hilary Rosen, it doesn't follow that that file is what it claims to be. Why wouldn't it be? Hell, I don't know. But it doesn't have to be. If you've used Gnutella (you say you still are. I for one stopped ages ago), surely you'll have encountered this sort of thing by now.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
Let's not go throwing around insults without understanding what they mean.
"...committing priacy and copyright..."
Both of these are violations of the law, but so what? Law is not the same as Right, and in fact, it has often been the opposite. It's possible to argue that music sharing amounts to civil disobedience, which all political theorists (who are not currently in power) will tell you is a Good Thing. Let's remember that a Good Thing is what's best for people in general, not what's best for the coorporations.
Here's how to make that argument:
Obviously, the system won't work if everyone gets their music for free. The recording companies won't make any profit, and people in general won't hear well-recorded music at all. This, however, does not by itself justify the bullshit that recording companies are putting us through. It is entirely possible for most people to get their music for free, and a few to pay for it.
People like CDs. They like the package, the booklet, the pictures. So, it's likely that of the people who download lots of free music, those of them who can afford to will buy the CDs they particularly like. Since about $17 of every $20 CD is pure profit for the record company, they really don't have to sell to a very high percentage of their audience. Some people say that this is the reason why record sales were at a peak before Napster died, and have dropped off since. I, personally, bought 5 of the 7 RIAA CDs I own because I heard the music first for free, illegally.
That would lead us to believe that we'd all be better off with filesharing/ piracy, even the giant rich companies everyone hates. Besides, making it illegal is like prohibition - now the only people who purvey shared files are themselves criminals, and can't be trusted. We all know what Kazaa tries to do to our computers.
<rant>
Another (moderatly less convincing) way to make this argument is to say that those &^%*& record companies shouldn't charge so much. Maybe if they charged a reasonable amount, like $7, for each CD, more peopel would buy. The reason this is less likely to convince is that free market capitalists will argue that the all-knowing public in this, our idealized capitalistic economy, would have counteracted any selfish moves of the businesses and prices will have already reached their equillibrium. The fact is that this just isn't true; the music industry, just like most others in America, is an oligopily, which functions just like a monopoly except that it avoids the letter of the law against monopolies.
</rant>
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
if by $1000, you mean $60, then you have a point.
Microsoft claims that the $60 version of Visual C++ doesn't optimize. I've been told that the performance of code compiled by the $60 version of Microsoft Visual C++ is close to that of interpreted JavaScript.
must be those $1000 modems keeping you down
You got me there; the excuses are over. I think I've found where to budget my next 80 USD: on an external V.92 modem plus shipping and tax.
Will I retire or break 10K?
To some extent, this is true, however the consumer does not pay directly. "Piped-in" music, as you refer to it, is paid for with subscription fees by the purchaser, just as every bar that hosts live "cover" bands must pay regular license fees to artist composer societies BMI or ASCAP.
The collected fees are distributed to artists based on their "market share" or tabulated plays via other sources.
Undoubtedly, the cover charge you pay, or the drink prices, or the cost of the bra you bought from the store that played your favorite Carpenter's Musak songs while you browsed, all contain the cost of these license fees factored in to the price *you* pay.
So they DO get money from you, however indirectly. The point is that popular music is not free, even if it is played on the radio. Fees are assessed at various points in the economic chain.
If you do not want your money to feed into this chain, do not purchase products from companies that play recorded commercial music in their stores, or frequent malls that have music piped in, or book stores, or coffee shops, or bars, or gyms, or....
I call that "Irony".
Presumably because english is not your first langauge.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Edonkey nicey shows your IP number so the authorities can track you down - as they have been doing in europe for a while, and as they apparently (see previous Slashdot stories) are starting to do in America as well.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...is an island nation in the southwest Pacific. They have a growing internet market, and they are the world's principal source of high-quality kava. The islands are volcanically active, however, which is the only thing stopping me from moving there. Vanuatu is also a common flag of convenience for many merchant ships that want to sidestep human rights for their crew. Now you know.
So basically your saying your giving the moral highground to a service that is "better" for committing priacy and copyright infringement as opposed to one that fosters spyware?
No. He's saying that between two services which can both be used for "priacy", he prefers the one that does not include spyware as an additional feature.
If you consider the function of P2P and spyware equally evil, doesn't it make sense to choose the one that is 1x evil rather than 2x?
Sony ha
Lawyers.. come to Vanuatu, plenty of uncurable malaria strains over here - Their Mosquitos are real bloodsuckers.
And under Tribal law, you may win something too, maybe fine them several pigs and kilos of breadfruit.Vanuatu has the tastiest coconut crab in the world - so come on down.
"Would you step in to replace them?"
You bet your sweet ass. The day that the RIAA starts suing college kids for wanting to try-before-buying music so as not to burn their parents' hard-earned education savings is the day that I personally invest time in writing/distributing my own P2P client.
The reason that hackers around the world haven't banded together on this issue is that there is already a solution - KaZaA and others - but it wouldn't take venture capital to come up with a replacement. I guarantee that at the bottom of the 9th inning, if Sharman goes down, they release their source and then people around the world pick up the ball and make it 10,000 times harder to litigate.
Why? you ask. IMHO, the hatred towards the entertainment industry is misguided. For me, it's not about prices or quality of material, it's about availability. If I could pay $100/month to a service on which I could see/hear anything I wanted, from old Bugs Bunny & Tiujana Toads cartoons to impossible to find Beatles outtakes, I would drop that cash in a heartbeat. The Main Reason I use KaZaA today is not that I'm some freeloading cheapskate, but that I can get a Louis Jordan single from the 40s in about 5 minutes, which is about how long it also takes me to get the most latest Bitchen-est Foo Fighters song.
Yet, those goddamn motherfuckers have yet to release Van Halen's 1981 live concert on video (even though they have the whole thing edited and ready to go, parts of which you can get on KaZaA), or let me query a database and download snippets of everything that (swoon) Jessica Alba has been in. To reiterate, I am willing to pay for these services. But since the Powers That Be have their collective head too far up their collective ass, they FORCE me to resort to "piracy" (Aarrghh!) to get any kind of content that isn't force-fed through the normal channels.
In Sum: Make it so that any consumer can buy/rent any electronic content that has ever been created is available, and I will pay just about anything (thus fairly compensating the artists, the copyright owner(s), and the various arms of the entertainment industry). Other than that, quit bitching.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
His name is defaultuser@kazaa. This guy is going to get the book thrown at him.
i personally believe soulseek is the best app. www.slsk.org. it has a dedicated amount of users who share what you would expect from an ftp and everyone has excellent tastes, probably the best selection out of any file sharing program and has the least amount of people and no leechers because leechers are bannable.
The U.S government and the U.N., European commonwealth, etc.., etc..., are going to base such things as nonproliferations treaties, trade agreements dealing with commodities like automobiles, parts, durables goods, etc, on a file sharing program. "No you can't join NATO because you're nation won't shut down a music sharing server? Do these words ring a bell - Pirated software, People Rebublic of China, Free Trade Agreement, and "MOST FAVORED NATION TRADING STATUS!!!!!
:-/
Ya, the RIAA/MPAA and it's parent subscribers issued an order to Congress and the Administration - "If Estonia won't shut Kazaa down and you want campaign money you'll pursuade them even if it means sending in a few dozen cruise missles to hit those damn servers"
Ya, sure - Ok.
Can someone just please explain to me why the picture of the CEO of the company that owns the interface looks like a cross between a dominatrix and The Terminator?
Maybe it's just me...
If it's $150k for a (say) 8MB song.
I wouldn't want to be on the recieving end of the suit for downloading that Bowling for Columbine DVD!
(and yes, if some bugger released it on DVD I'd be first in line to buy)
Plus, in general, we'd have to say that the english speaking film world is very much "based" in one place. Certainly a lot more than the english language music world is.
Kazaa down, who's next?
That is, if they ever catch Kazaa (or Kazaa goes to a pay service)
Wow, no one has discover the warez trading over 802.11 yet?
It appears to me that everyone in this battle is ignoring the real problem.
:)
The RIAA needs to realize that if commercial music wasn't so expensive, that the p2p networks wouldn't be quite so rampant. Sure, there would always be people who would pirate the content because they still couldn't afford the prices, or because they were adverse to obeying the law.
Conversely, if there weren't quite so many p2p networks and music pirates going around, maybe the RIAA would come to their senses and lower the prices some.
Either way you slice it, the problem boils down to the amount of money charged per CD or movie.
BTW, just imagine the karmic debt that both sides are piling up.
probably right. I was thinking that Windowsers would use it since they are used to the name "Kazaa" but then again this didn't work for Morpheus after they switched to Gnutella. So should we hope for Kazaa being sued to death to get rid of the bannerads? I guess so.
cu,
Lispy
why bother with kazaa?? and a low PL?
download kazaa++ and there's no advertisements, no spyware and your PL stays at 1000 (max) forever
it also has neat little programs included to enable you to use sig2dat codes, an avi viewer to view partial downloads and also a facilty to search for 100's of extra results
www.dom007.co.uk
www.kplusplus.tk
Estonia mentioned on slashdot
the whole country is sure to be slashdotted.
rt
That's the first p2p application. 99% of what most ppl use usenet for is downloading pr0n. Though most pics are posted as teaser ads from web-sites I doubt the copyright fees have been paid on most of it. One has no idea if the poster of a random usenet pr0n pic owns the copyright or not. For that matter there is no way for Joe Sixpack who uses Kazaa to know that the Eminem song he is downloading is NOT being shared from a server run by a record company as a 'promotion'.
Eat at Joe's.
Seems like a lot of people are searching for reasons to shut kazaa down or keep it up and running, but I believe in the KISS principle. How did copyright laws come about in the first place. They came about because we live in a democracy, and the majority figured it was a good thing to have, not anything the record idustry did. Well now we have 90 million copies or more of Kazaa being dowloaded, and that seems to be a pretty good chunk of a majority, considering how many computer users there are compared with total population. Just because we decided on a set of rules some time ago does not mean we cannot change these rules, especially if it is the majority that wants them changed, ITS A DEMOCRACY AFTERALL!
Sick son of a pootnuh!
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Man dies after gaming marathon:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-961731.html
...you have to wonder why.
For more info on the Republic of Vanuatu: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ nh.html
Let's remember the context of the story-- SHUTTING DOWN KAZAA. We're not, or at least i'm not talking about home brewed FTP servers or whatnot. I'm talking about P2P networks with 90% or more (Kazaa for instance) of their traffic dealing in copywrite violating transfers.
While ICQ can be used to do the same thing, it is first and formost designed as an IM program. If you tell me there isn't a vast difference between Kazaa and ICQ, I'll laugh in your face. While piracy can occure using ICQ. It's simply not set up for large scale searching and downloading. It's like handing your friend a select book instead of being able to view any book in the Library of Congress and download any one you want, which is Kazaa's method.
You're right-- Just because something can be used illegally doesn't make the goods or services inheritly bad. But when you're service deals in mostly in illegal goods, you become the subject of intense scrutiny. In this case, kazaa has been labled a crack house. Your Apache server, hasn't.
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